Sometime after the 1986 success of “Top Gun,” it became clear to top scientists that, while Tom Cruise was then America’s Sweetheart, there would at some point come a day when his boyish charms would start to wear off, and the star would go batshit crazy and lose his audience. To head this off, the Cruise Cloning project was born; the star’s DNA was to be replicated and a series of copies were created, with the intention of replacing the star with a slightly younger version of himself every few years. But a fire broke out in the lab in May 1997, and a 9-year-old clone, TCX-3756, escaped into the wild, leading to the project’s shut down. Rumors were rife that the copy had been taken in at a musical theatre school, but he was never found.
Now, in 2010, Zac Efron (as TCX-3756 now goes by) is only a few weeks away from the release of “Charlie St. Cloud,” his second attempt at establishing himself as a leading man outside the “High School Musical” franchise, following the moderate success of last year’s “17 Again.” But his ambitions don’t stop at dull-looking movies about dead kids and yachting; the 22-year-old actor now has his own production company, Ninjas Runnin’ Wild Productions, which is apparently what happens if you let a 22-year-old choose the name.
The shingle was set up with Warner Bros in February and already has an impressive slate lining up, including a remake of the hotly-tipped Swedish drugs drama “Snabba Cash,” an adaptation of the Brian Michael Bendis graphic novel “Fire,” about a college student recruited into the CIA, and “Einstein Theory”, a time travel comedy with “Get Him To The Greek” writer/director Nicholas Stoller. And now, two further projects have been added.
First up is an untitled workplace comedy from writer Jason Filardi, which will see Efron produce alongside his “Hairspray” director Adam Shankman. Secondly, and more intriguingly, there is an adaptation of the Wired magazine article “The Art of the Steal.” The piece, by Joshua Bearman, tells the extraordinary true story of a successful, genius-level thief, and sparked a bidding war on publication a few months ago. There’s no writer on the project yet, and Efron wasn’t exactly who we had in mind for the lead role, but as you can see from the must-read original article, it would take a blunder of monumental proportions to mess that story up. [The Hollywood Reporter]